“I thought ‘this is it’– I was bleeding at a phenomenal rate”

A man lies ashen-faced, blood gushing from the mangled stump that was, until just a moment ago, home to his forearm. He leans up towards the medic who is desperately trying to stem the crimson tide gushing through his makeshift tourniquet. "Tell my family I love them," he says in a frail voice. There's not a single IED or insurgent in sight and the man's blood doesn't seep onto some dusty road north of Helmand Province, but onto the shopfloor of a north Kent paper mill. "I said to Darren, this is it," says Paul Mahoney, the victim that day in November 2000. "You think this is your last view of life. I was bleeding at a phenomenal rate. He simply leaned back, kissed my forehead and said: 'You can tell them'." At that moment, the statement seemed like wishful thinking. Mahoney, a process engineer at the M-real plant at Kemsley near Sittingbourne, had lost four pints of blood after his arm was severed from below the elbow while performing maintenance work. "We were returning bales of recycled pulp back into the system," explains Mahoney of the fateful build up to the accident. "Unfortunately, the bales we used were old and had started to dry out. They didn't break down easily and they would get stuck." It's a familiar shopfloor scene. A machine breaks down. The engineer arrives with orders to fix it and fix it fast. "The procedure was radio upstairs and say you've got a blockage," says Mahoney. "One of our operators would then go to a switchgear room and isolate the machine for us. We would then open the hatches and dig out. There were three methods: a compressed airline, an iron bar and doing it by hand." My first thought was I had broken my arm The machine's blades ground to a halt and Mahoney steeled himself to clear a blockage that had already cost 30 precious minutes of production time. A brief thumbs up and he plunged his left arm into the screw conveyor section of the machine. Seconds later, a sudden jolt and the horrifying whir of 1,400rpm powering the machine back up. "The first thing I thought was: 'I've got a busted arm'. I pulled my arm out expecting it to be at some new fantastic angle, but I could still see the floor. I thought: 'hang on a minute, something is missing here.'" Mahoney wheeled around to meet with a colleague's horrified expression. "I saw the fear of Christ in his eyes. And he just ran. The only thing I could do was grab hold of my stump, push it against my chest and follow him." The next moment he was bundled to the floor as friend and first aider, Darren tried to halt the prodigious bleeding. Paramedics arrived on the scene and began stabilising Mahoney while the air ambulance was scrambled. He remained conscious throughout and claims he suffered no pain, "just shock". Meanwhile co-workers set about recovering Mahoney's severed arm. "It actually came out quicker than expected and landed in the engineer's lap," recalls Mahoney. The limb was packed up in ice and sent on board the air ambulance. Miraculously, surgeons were able to reattach the arm in a 16-hour operation at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead. Mahoney, the only person in the UK to have had a successful limb replantation, retains movement in the arm. Maintenance: an accident hotspot But he can also lay claim to membership of a far less exclusive club: an industrial worker severely injured during maintenance activity. Fourteen years on from Mahoney's accident and the green cross is rivalling the spanner as the most fitting emblem for the maintenance office door. Maintenance activity still accounts for around three in 10 factory fatalities, according to HSE figures. The statistic can partly be explained by the sheer scale of equipment that factory teams must tend to, equipment that is often large, precarious and difficult to access. Factor in a laissez-faire shopfloor safety culture and you have all the conditions for a perfect storm. "It was an accident waiting to happen," says Mahoney, who has retrained as a health and safety motivational speaker since the accident. "It was going to get one of the 25 of us [on the shopfloor] and, in the end, it got me. Some people might say: 'you knew it was going to happen and you didn't stop it?' Well, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but when you're in the moment you don't see the dangers and just get stuck in with a task." In such circumstances, safety can become an almost spiritual force. You can't see it, you can't hear it, but everyone still believes it's there. "We were almost a band of brothers," reflects Mahoney. "When you are like that, you trust one another. I trusted that my colleague had radioed upstairs and that the message had been received okay. We took it for granted that we were all safe." Far better to address safety in a more evangelical way, advises Mahoney. "There needs to be a visible commitment from managers and from the guys. Management need to be on the shopfloor, they need to get that rapport and trust. The guys need to know: he is interested in getting me home safe and that the machine is right for the job. If you don't feel it's right then say so. Don't just think: 'they won't listen to me'. Bring up issues, but also bring up solutions." Finger pointing is a futile exercise, he reflects. "I have no malice," he says of his then employer, New Thames Paper Company, which was fined £16,000 for failing to provide safe systems of work following his accident. Instead, in moments of solitude – as he walks his dogs, Troy, Madison and Alfie Moon across the Canterbury marshes – Mahoney focuses instead on his own actions that day. "I live it every day, "he reflects. "I rack my brains about what we could have done differently. I think I would have slowed down; taken five seconds... don't put yourself under pressure. Maybe it would have helped if somebody had come from a different department and said: 'what are you doing that for lads, don't you see the dangers?'" Hindsight, as Mahoney, acknowledges, is a wonderful thing. But it's not nearly as magical as foresight in manufacturing's quest to banish maintenance injuries. Mahoney concludes: "I lost four pints of blood that day. I don't want anyone else in my shoes. I've paid the price for being complacent... if I can get someone to stop that extra five seconds then it's been worthwhile." So pick up that phone to the maintenance team and schedule that long overdue safety review. It will be the smartest five seconds you ever spend. n Paul Mahoney will be speaking at WM's all new Factory Health and Maintenance Conference on 5 June in Warwickshire where a host of top speakers will discuss the secrets of site safety and maintenance success. See www.maintenance-conference.co.uk 'Be prepared' to beat maintenance accidents Crushing, asphyxiation, electrocution, plunging from height. The breadth of hazards facing your average maintenance team is enough to turn ordinary mortals into gibbering wrecks. But, says HSE inspector Jim Corbridge, adopt the Scouts' motto – 'be prepared' – and there's nothing to fear. "In a lot of cases, accidents happen because people don't have the systems in place," he says. "They're relying on the individual to get it right rather than taking responsibility." Safety starts with self-reflection, says the HSE inspector. Risk assess your activities, identify precautions, formalise your processes and then use the learning to train your people. Plant isolation and lock down procedures are likely to feature prominently in initial risk assessments, he adds. A failure to power down machinery properly is a common accident blindspot, says Corbridge. "In some cases, there's more than one energy source – accidents are caused by failure to remove a secondary source of energy," he explains. Another top threat, as in Paul Mahoney's case, is a machine being restarted while a worker is still working on it. Padlocks offer a powerful deterrent to such incidents, HSE advises. A maintenance worker is able to lock off power with his or her own padlock. Power can only be restored once the individual locks out and is clear of danger. Permits to work are another safety-boosting tool, says Corbridge: "For the person to go into a machine, they would have to go to the supervisor who would check the isolation had been put on before allowing them to proceed." The system is particularly useful where a contractor's work interfaces with production activities, according to HSE. Finally, whatever safety system you decide on, remember its ultimate success will be dictated by your site culture, adds Corbridge. "People will always want to keep production running. The person who takes a shortcut is not trying to make their life easier. They just want to get production running again." Read more on maintenance safety at: www.hse.gov.uk/safemaintenance Here are some ways Mahoney's accident might have been avoided: Taking more time: Mahoney and his colleague were conscientious that the blockage had to be cleared to reduce costly production downtime. "We put ourselves under pressure," reflects Mahoney. Safety was taken for granted as the duo prioritised relieving the block. Clear safety systems: Mahoney believes that, had the pair brought in a third party, either another site or department, to examine their procedures and behaviours, they could have seen the potential dangers. Communication: Mahoney and his colleague mistakenly assumed their colleague in the switchgear room had received their messages. A clearer procedure on waiting for sign off from the switchgear room before entering the machine may have saved Mahoney from injury. Local isolation: The machine responsible for Mahoney's accident could not be isolated locally. If it had, it could have been locked down by his colleague – who would have had clear sight of Mahoney – and not restarted the machine until he finished the job.